Why we think it’s a great listen: You thought he was a stodgy scientist with funny hair, but Isaacson and Hermann reveal an eloquent, intense, and selfless human being who not only shaped science with his theories, but politics and world events in the 20th century as well. Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In best-selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours. The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.

Steve Jobs

Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

1776

Why we think it’s a great listen: If you ever thought history was boring, David McCullough’s performance of his fascinating book will change your mind. In this stirring audiobook, McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence, when the whole American cause was riding on their success.

Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

No skill is more important in today's world than being able to think about, understand, and act on information in an effective and responsible way. What's more, at no point in human history have we had access to so much information, with such relative ease, as we do in the 21st century. But because misinformation out there has increased as well, critical thinking is more important than ever. These 24 rewarding lectures equip you with the knowledge and techniques you need to become a savvier, sharper critical thinker in your professional and personal life.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.

The Wright Brothers

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story behind the story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly: Wilbur and Orville Wright.

On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright's Wright Flyer became the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. The Age of Flight had begun. How did they do it? And why?

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era. Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

There have been many books - on a large and small scale - about Steve Jobs, one of the most famous CEOs in history. But this book is different from all the others. Becoming Steve Jobs takes on and breaks down the existing myth and stereotypes about Steve Jobs. The conventional, one-dimensional view of Jobs is that he was half genius, half jerk from youth, an irascible and selfish leader who slighted friends and family alike.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know about Leadership

While building the Virgin Group over 40 years, Richard Branson has never shied away from seemingly outlandish challenges that others (including his own colleagues on several occasions) considered sheer lunacy. He has taken on giants like British Airways and won, and monsters like Coca-Cola and lost. Now Branson gives an inside look at his strikingly different swashbuckling style of leadership.

John Adams

McCullough's John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. This is history on a grand scale, an audiobook about politics, war, and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, it is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.

A Brief History of Time

This landmark book is for those of us who prefer words to equations; this is the story of the ultimate quest for knowledge, the ongoing search for the secrets at the heart of time and space. Its author, Stephen W. Hawking, is arguably the greatest mind since Einstein. From the vantage point of the wheelchair, where he has spent the last 20 years trapped by Lou Gehrig's disease, Professor Hawking has transformed our view of the universe. A Brief History of Time is Hawking's classic introduction to today's most important scientific ideas.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.

Washington: A Life

In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. This crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America's first president.

Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla: Biography of a Genius

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), credited as the inspiration for radio, robots, and even radar, has been called the patron saint of modern electricity. Based on original material and previously unavailable documents, this acclaimed book is the definitive biography of the man considered by many to be the founding father of modern electrical technology.

Isaac Newton

James Gleick has long been fascinated by the making of science: how ideas order visible appearances, how equations can give meaning to molecular and stellar phenomena, how theories can transform what we see. In Chaos, he chronicled the emergence of a new way of looking at dynamic systems; in Genius, he portrayed the wondrous dimensions of Richard Feymnan's mind.

Audible Editor Reviews

Why we think it's Essential: Isaacson is the modern master of the biography, so it was only natural that he turn his pen to Einstein. And more than any biography of the past, Isaacson's account unravels the life behind the brain and provides a full picture of the man who embodied the scientific spirit of the 20th century. Edward Herrmann is stirring and moves effortlessly from humorous anecdotes to scientific theories. Chris Doheny

Publisher's Summary

How did Einstein's mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.

Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk, a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate, became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

What the Critics Say

Audie Award Winner, Biography/Memoir, 2008

"[A] lucid account." (Publishers Weekly) "Isaacson has admirably succeeded in weaving together the complex threads of Einstein's personal and scientific life to paint a superb portrait." (Arthur I. Miller, author of Einstein, Picasso) "Isaacson has written a crisp, engaging, and refreshing biography, one that beautifully masters the historical literature and offers many new insights into Einstein's work and life." (Diana Kormos Buchwald, General Editor of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein)

This is truly a great audio book – and a steal at 1 credit. The author not only describes Einstein’s life in fantastic details – he also dedicates a fair amount of pages to the explanation of the theory of relativity. He does this surprisingly well – and in a way that makes you understand what it is all about. To this end, you can regard this title as both an Einstein biography and a “Relativity Theories for Dummies”. The narrator Edward Herrmann (as always) was a really good choice for this book. I enjoyed this book immensely – and can only urge others to download it and learn more about this incredible human being that Albert Einstein really was.

In combining the personal and scientific story of Einstein Walter Isaacson has truly created a moving and highly entertaining biography. From his early triumphs as a Swiss patent examiner when he made his earliest breakthroughs to his quixotic quest for a "unified field theory" and his connection to the Jewish people I loved this book. If I were a Pulitzer voter I would give it a Pulitzer for biography. Edward Herrmann narrates with great care and I was able to follow the complex scientific parts with ease. If you download this book you will not be disappointed.

Although extremely long, at over 21 hours, this audio book is well written and well read. With all of the time I invested in listening, when the end came I felt as if I was saying goodbye to an old friend. Very much worth the time and effort to listen.

I feel like I just finished a minimester crash course in Physics. Not an easy read but worth the effort for the history alone. I learned a great deal about the 1st half of the 20th century, World War 1 & 2, European Universities, political climates, Nobel politics and more. It took me a while to get through it all and I may listen to some setions again to be sure I got it all. Really interesting in the personal aspects of Einstein and the level of fame and celebrity he enjoyed while alive.

Absolutely great. There were so many details that history did not seem to detail well enough, but look no further than here. You don't need to know physics to enjoy this book, but you can learn. What an incredible journey of one of the greatest minds in history.

A beautiful read into the life and intellectual struggles of Einstein as he dealt with personal issues and world events. Isaacson truly does a brilliant job of pulling no punches and pulling the reader into the struggles Einstein went through as a Jewish intellectual in Nazi Germany and then the patriotic vigor of pushing the US to invest the time and energy to build the bomb to beat the German's to it and then the moral struggling he dealt with living with the realization that helped in the slaughter of millions of people. One of the best biographies I have ever read.

As a PhD scientist I found that the book was a tremendous blend of not only the facts of his life but also a glimpse of how different the scientific world was in the early 1900's, how the public perceived science and the breadth of Einstein's life, accomplisments and goals.

First this book gives a perspective about the man who may be the greatest scientific contributor. Brlliant in science and so human away from his theories. His intellect did not spare him from issues with women and family. He generated great loyalty from some and created life long enemies with others. His passion for sociological issues was as deep as his passion for science.

For the non physicists, this book provides the best explanation of his theories I've ever read. It very succinctly provides the principles and their applications accurately without watering it down to be meaningless.

The book tells of the comraderie amongst the most famous scientists of the day. I marvel that the interaction between Einstein and such notables as Marie Curie, Max Planck, Schroedinger (to name drop a few) communicated in such a meaningful way in a time when electricity was new! Imagine Einstein and Marie Curie's family going on vacations together!

The other fascinating thing is the interest the general public had in science at that time. Imagine that the theory of relativity was front page news in the NY Times - or that people would gather in auditoriums not for a rock concert, but to hear the results of a research project that would confirm the relativity theory!

Very long, but worth it. Fascinating to learn about the life behind the famous theory. The author does a great job of explaining the science to those of us who are challenged in that subject. Obviously well researched and well organized.

It took me quite a while to be engaged by this book. I almost quit it a number of times but kept plodding thru it until it finally captured my interest. The problem is the first 1/3 of the book is primarily the text of letters written to and by Einstein. I did not find there to be much insight into Einstein's life or any deduction by the author as to why or why not Einstein made certain choices in his science or personal life. However, once the book reaches the "miracle year" and more science is involved I found the book much more interesting. I also enjoyed the last part of the book immensely when Einstein's science is not as prevelant but his celebrity and social ideals become a major part of his character.

This book on the life of Einstein was without a doubt the most indepth, personal, whitty, piece of work I've ever heard! It shocked me on many respects how he lived his life, both good and bad. This book is one I'll definiately be listening to again. I found that this book was perfect to keep my mind stimulated while doing my boring job. Many times I found myself laughing out-loud and having people give me funny looks. Einstein was more comical than I could have eer imagined! I only wish more scientists shared his mentality in this day and age and didn't believe all this evolution mumbo jumbo.

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